on sofware development and technology

Groovy-DDLUtils

Nov 29th, 2011

Apache DDLUtils is a small but very useful library for migrating data and translating SQL schemas from one SQL database to another. DDLUtils includes support for an impressive list of SQL dialects, including all the major commercial and open-source RDBMS products.

The DDLUtils project provides a jar file containing the library code and a set of Ant tasks that use the library to perform common tasks – exporting a schema from a live database to a text file, and importing a schema from a text file to a live database. I haven’t written an Ant XML build file for several years, and after some time away I find the Ant XML very verbose and cumbersome to work with.

Looking for an easier and more accessible way harness the power of DDLUtils, I turned to Groovy. Groovy scripts are a great way to leverage Java APIs in an expressive way, often with just a few lines of code. After using a few special-purpose Groovy scripts with DDLUtils, I decided to generalize the script to make it more configuration-driven and therefore more usable. The result is the Groovy-DDLUtils project.

The Groovy-DDLUtils project page on GitHub includes documentation on using and customizing the Groovy script, so I won’t repeat that here. Take a look, give it a try, and send any feedback or enhancements suggestions via issues on GitHub, or comments on this blog.